Ardent Nazi took Liberal to extremes

4 March 2006 — 11:00am

THE passing of Lyenko Urbanchich ends the almost 70-year political career of the man who invented ethnic branch stacking in Australia. He was also the last, and most powerful, of the central and eastern European Nazi collaborators and war criminals who infiltrated the Liberal Party from the 1950s and coalesced with Australian rightists to form the "Uglies" faction.

A charismatic and highly motivated extremist leader, Urbanchich died without ever publicly acknowledging his role as a senior Nazi collaborator and propagandist in Slovenia during World War II. In private, he acknowledged to this author that his wartime anti-Jewish tirades were bound to have offended many Australians, although he persistently pursued anti-Semitic causes at all levels of his political life.

Not surprisingly, Urbanchich made numerous enemies. Many of his opponents recount his brooding, intimidatory presence at Liberal Party meetings, where he would sit quietly and take notes, looking like a condor ready to pounce on a carcass. Although his behaviour was seen by many as menacing, Urbanchich was very much a behind-the-scenes operator, getting others to say and do as he directed. In private, he often belittled his moderate opponents in the Liberal Party, including "ambitious idiots" and "opportunists".

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This private discourtesy was contrary to Urbanchich's self-image. He ostensibly idealised good manners and courtesy. His allies and friends believed this was sincere and showed tenacious loyalty towards him, even after the exposure of his obnoxious anti-Jewish, anti-British and anti-US wartime propaganda. He inspired loyalty from lesser people, who revered his steely determination to prevail against odds that would have deterred most ordinary zealots.

Urbanchich clearly occupied an intellectual universe foreign to most people. For example, after I interviewed him at length in 1979 volunteered that he had separated from his German first wife, Waltraud, because they had quarrelled, sometimes bitterly, about the guilt she felt over the Nazis' genocide of the Jews.

Urbanchich said he urged her to overcame these feelings of shame and "to be proud of her people". After his divorce from Waltraud, Urbanchich married Beverley, an American who remained with him for the rest of his life. He had no children.

Much of Urbanchich's political activism was centred on Sydney's inner west, especially the Liberal Party's Five Dock branch, a far-right bastion from which he built a wider network. For many years, however, he lived in Bronte Road in Waverley, where he also built another powerful political base. He worked closely with Jim and Caroline Markham, who had both been Liberal mayors of Waverley Council, and with the eccentric ruling-class, right-wing activist Major Ashley Riddle.

For many years he also owned a property at Kurrajong, which he set up as a mixture of nostalgic throwback to his Slovenian homeland and paramilitary training centre. The property (named Mount Milena, after his mother) had a military-style guardhouse at the entrance, and a parade ground, with flagpole, on which Urbanchich supervised regular ultra-nationalist displays of fervour.

He considered himself to be something of a sculptor and the parade ground featured a huge sculpture of a Middle Age-era Slovenian knight, which now adorns the entrance to one of Sydney's Slovenian social and cultural clubs.

A rather humourless man, Urbanchich lived in a state of permanent political activism. For many years, he operated his office from a converted railway carriage at Turrella. He shared this unusual headquarters with a film production company, Fontana Films, but the closest Urbanchich came to entertainment was to produce his far-right magazine, Esprit de Corps, and to operate Liberty Research, an extremist think tank.

Born in 1922 in what became Yugoslavia (now independent Slovenia), Urbanchich grew up in an era of left and right totalitarianism. At a young age, he chose fascism and in sixth grade was expelled from school as an ardent member of Yugoslavia's pro-Nazi party, the Zbor, for which he became a capable organiser and propagandist at university in Slovenia's capital, Ljubljana.

The son of a poor customs official, Urbanchich was 18 when Germany and Italy divided Slovenia in 1941. He was sent to an Italian concentration camp for nine months for organising a pro-German military unit. Following Italy's surrender in September 1943, the Nazis quickly filled the vacuum and made Urbanchich's mentor, Leon Rupnik, Slovenia's puppet "president".

At 20, Urbanchich was catapulted into a senior position in the German quisling administration. In early October 1943, Urbanchich wrote his first pro-Nazi article and organised the first SS-backed Home Guard volunteers, for which he was promoted into the Information Department, the Nazi-controlled propaganda section.

In the following 18 months, Urbanchich became "Ljubljana's Little Goebbels", as he spewed forth streams of Nazi propaganda in newspapers and on radio. His themes were invariably the same: communist Jews controlled Britain and the US, who were using negroes in their war against Hitler's New Europe. A radio broadcast from June 1944 illustrates that theme: "We went to war for Jewish interests, for the benefit of international communism", and the responsibility rested "with those 'allies', the British, Soviets and Masons, and above all, and I stress the words above all, the Jews - sworn enemies of Christianity and all the non-Jewish world".

Despite Urbanchich's efforts, the communist-led partisans won the civil war and in 1945 he fled westward. Allied policy was to return proven war criminals, traitors and quislings to Tito's government, and thousands of rank and file were repatriated and summarily executed. Western policy also excluded collaborators, classified as "blacks" or "greys", from immigration to the West. Only "whites" (Nazi victims) could enter countries such as Australia.

Urbanchich not only avoided extradition and certain death, but was "bleached" from "black" to "grey" and finally to "white", despite being on the West's final list of 44 proven Nazi collaborators. He was selected for immigration to Australia, arriving in 1950. After working on the Snowy scheme, he threw himself into political activity, editing a Slovene newspaper and forming several clandestine groups dedicated to communism's violent overthrow. He kept detailed file indexes on his allies and opponents and maintained his own intelligence network.

By the early 1960s, Urbanchich was under ASIO and federal police surveillance. By then, many Nazi collaborators and war criminals had infiltrated the Liberal Party's Migrant Advisory Council, whose leaders included an ex-Hungarian mayor responsible for deporting 18,000 Jews to Auschwitz's gas chambers.

Urbanchich's emergence as a key organiser of fascist groups changed the methods of infiltration and became the touchstone of the far-right's success in the NSW Liberal Party. By 1964, Urbanchich was president of the Liberal Party's Kings Cross branch, and ran the 50 Club in Darlinghurst, where central and eastern European fascists mixed with Australian rightists. Using his extensive emigre connections, over two decades he stacked Liberal branches in Sydney's inner-western, eastern, outer-north-western and south-western suburbs, and even Newcastle.

He exploited lax membership rules and recruited fellow Nazi collaborators and supporters of far-right campaigns. These included not only anti-communism, but also racist, causes, especially promoting the White Australia policy, Rhodesian and South African white supremacy, and close alignment with the anti-Jewish League of Rights. Urbanchich's activities became public in 1966, when he campaigned against Ted St John, the Liberal candidate for Warringah. St John's crime was his alleged support for communism because he had assisted South African blacks arrested for anti-apartheid activities, and had shared a platform with a "negro" who allegedly was a communist.

The peak of Urbanchich's success came in 1977 with the formation of the Liberal Ethnic Council. As council president, he automatically had a seat on the state executive. Other council executive members included his close ally, David Clarke, who learnt ethnic branch stacking techniques from his mentor and today leads the "Uglies" faction established by Urbanchich 40 years ago.

Clarke helped organise the numbers to narrowly save Urbanchich from expulsion from the Liberal Party after a 1979 ABC radio documentary (which I produced) exposed him as a Nazi propagandist. Urbanchich initially defended himself by claiming that documents used in the program were communist forgeries.

When copies of his propaganda were found in Western archives (including contemporaneous British intelligence microfilms), he switched to arguing that German censors had inserted the pro-Nazi content. This was rejected by the Liberal inquiry, but, despite the evidence, the 1980 vote to expel him fell just short of the 60 per cent required.

The NSW Liberals' moderate faction bitterly regrets this failure. In the following 15 years, Urbanchich successfully continued his ethnic branch stacking. In 1996, Urbanchich and Clarke established the far-right's ironically named "central committee". By 2005 Clarke controlled the NSW state executive, the Young Liberals (in NSW and federally) and the NSW Women's Council.

From this powerful position, the faction Urbanchich founded in the 1960s has embarked on a purge of moderates, especially in the NSW parliamentary party. Clarke's support base today is the same far-right constituency that Urbanchich built through ethnic branch stacking, especially using extremist elements in the Croatian and Christian Lebanese communities and often involving violence.

Although he allegedly fell out recently with Clarke, Urbanchich remained active in Liberal affairs until he died, as the eminence grise often lurking in the shadows at party meetings. After almost 70 years of intense activity in fascist and far-right causes, he remained unrepentant about his pro-Nazi past. He would, however, have died happy in the knowledge that his long campaign to control the NSW Liberal Party and insinuate his extremist views into its policy agenda has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Mark Aarons

Mark Aarons has written extensively about Lyenko Urbanchich's life and political career, most recently in his 2001 book War Criminals Welcome.